1. Field of the Invention
The present invention relates to a technology for tracing data in an audit trail in an information system.
2. Description of the Related Art
An audit trail is practiced for ex post facto verification in an audit of an information system. In it is verified whether each control function in the information system has functioned properly in terms of securing reliability, safety, and efficiency of the information system. For example, a log of manipulation of information (sending out/printing), authentication, and access to a database is utilized.
In recent years, collection and analysis of logs as an audit trail have become important as countermeasures against information leakage under the privacy protection law and the corporate reform law. The logs are collected from personal computers (PC) and various servers, and a person that has leaked information can be traced by searching the collected logs. Such a technology is disclosed in, for example, Japanese Patent Application Laid-Open Publication No. 2003-076662.
However, a type and a recording form of the logs differ according to an operation system (OS) and an application in terms of grammar and meaning, and have no consistency. Therefore, the log collection itself is not easy and analysis of the collected logs is even more difficult.
For example, in an information system that searches customer information, accesses to a database server that stores customer information sometimes apply a system ID issued by a task application server that executes the search processing in the information system. In such a case, it is difficult to trace which one of users has made accesses to the database server only with the logs stored in the database server.
To trace the logs to audit over the entire information system, accurate grasp of the flow of information over the entire information system is essential. However, tracing and analyzing the logs are getting more difficult because the flow of information becomes more complicated in an information system as a scale of the information system becomes larger.
A conventional user ID is different in allocation by domain of each task application and each PC. However, tracing across the domains of task applications and PCs is impossible.
As described above, in conventional method of administration of the audit trail, the important security requirements such as collection and analysis of logs are not satisfied. Therefore, tracing of information leakage over the entire information system is difficult and the effect of blocking the information leakage can not be substantially obtained.